Cognitive Development Stages

Babies will start to take an Interest in playing with fingers and opening and closing hands.

Pre-operational stage (toddler and early childhood) is demonstrated through the use of symbols, language, matures, memory and imagination are developed but thinking is non-logical.

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

In this domain Piaget stated that the child who is still in the preoperational stage can’t conceptualize abstractly and needs concrete physical situations. They can’t mentally manipulate information. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs and their thinking is still egocentric, which means that the child has difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others. Piaget split this stage into the symbolic and intuitive thought substage. In the symbolic function stage children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. Vygotsky stated that children learn cognitive tasks through their interactions with older peers and adults. Not only do younger children watch and imitate older people or peers as they complete tasks, but these older guides also help younger children accomplish tasks they couldn’t accomplish on their own. He calls this the zone of proximal development which he describes what children can do alone and what they can do with assistance. Another theorist named Bandura coined the term observational learning which means people learn appropriate social behaviors by observing and modeling others. This type of learning is most effective during childhood. Vygotsky believed that the important part of the cognitive development is language. He observed that very young

The intelligence of a child is demonstrated by the use of signs, improvement of language, memory and the imagination when articulating in the non-logical and non-reversible way. The child’s sphere of socialization improves when the child is engaged with other people around them; if this does not happen and the child is reserved to itself there is a possibility the child will lack ability to make his/her own decisions in life after (Dodge, 2004).

| third stage of cognitive development in which the school-age child becomes capable of logical though processes but is not yet capable of abstract

preconventional stage occurs from 4-10 years of age. The child will learn reasoning through the parents demand for

Concrete cognitive operations as outlined by Jean Piaget are typically children who are between the ages 8-11 years. Cognitive skills of this group are able to perform inductive reasoning. In addition, objects or events need to be experienced. Some major schemas proposed by Piaget are class inclusion, such as all birds have wings. Another schema is serial ordering, as babies need very small shoes, and children need shoes that bigger than babies, and adults need the biggest shoes of all. The most popular schema referenced on the internet was conservation, which I think is explained best by this one-minute video.

Also,“Proximo-distal development is shown by young children gaining control over their arms before their hands and fingers” (Kamptner, 2015).

The fourth stage of Piaget’s Cognitive Stages of Development is the Formal operational stage. This stage is normally reached at age 11. These children are usually able to logically use symbols related to abstract concepts, such as algebra and science. These children can think about multiple variables in systemic ways, form hypotheses, and consider possibilities. Although Piaget believed in lifelong intellectual development, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development, and that continued intellectual development in adults depends on the accumulation of knowledge (Shroff, 2015).

Jean Piaget discovered that our capacity for reasoning is developed in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations stage (Hutchinson, 2015). Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years) is when and infant gradually learns to coordinate sensory and motor activities, and develops a beginning sense of objects existing apart from self. Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years) is when a child starts to discover rules that they can apply to new information, sometimes they can over complicate the rules which leads to them making mistakes. Concrete operations

The brain is already 95% of its adult size by age six. However, according to Piaget, adolescents are mastering propositional thoughts at this age. This means that adolescents can conclude whether a statement is rational based merely on the wording of the statement, rather than having to

Both Berk (2010) and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford (2012) claim that by this age an adolescent should be thinking in more abstract, systematic and logical ways. Therefore, according to the articles researched for this issue and the behavior exhibited by this adolescent would indicate a delay in cognitive development. This delay not only affects his personal reasoning, but also has delayed his cognitive development to solve hypothetical problems, thus, lower his ability solve situations not yet experienced. Remaining in the concrete operational

Children in this stage do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information.

From about age 2 to age 7, in which children begin to use symbols, especially words, to understand objects and simple ideas. lasting from about age 7 to age 11 or 12, in which children begin to think in terms of cause and effect